Update: Age rating of our film

Our product was intended to be aimed at the age group of 15+ because our narrative was aimed at the age group who could understand and handle how bullying can lead to serious damage in a person. We also did not want to encourage any of the dangerous actions in our film, therefore our film idea was initially suitable as a 15 rated film. However, with some research on the BBFC website to clarify our thoughts on which age rating it should be, we found that because we have a small scene of the knife inserting the bully, it should be changed to an 18 rated film as people under this age would not be able to tolerate the violence of this scene. If it was to be released to a younger audience, they would potentially be hypodermically injected with thoughts of violence and may carry out the same procedure. This is shown in a real life example of the case of the two boys who killed the 2 year old Jamie Bulger after watching the horror movie 'Child's play 3'. They committed a copycat crime of copying the exact actions that took place in the movie, such as throwing the brick and taking the toddler to a train track. Whilst watching this movie, it lead to the feeling of desensitisation in the boys as they were desensitised to violence and so did not feel any remorse whilst killing the toddler.
We feel that our film is rated 18 instead of 15 because younger audiences may not understand the meaning behind Mila's revenge.

After an email sent to the BBFC by myself, they had confirmed that if our film was to be published then it would be an 18 rated film because of the stabbing scene.
 (click on the image for a larger view)

After Jacob's email, I decided to check the links he had provided me and found this (the following image) in relation to our product:

This made me have a better feeling about our product being an 18 rated film rather than a 15 rated film as our film have scenes of violence in it. Although I was slightly in a confused state and waited for the education team from the BBFC to respond to me.





As I waited, I researched other 15 rates horror films and shows and found that the show 'Black Mirror' Season 3, episode 5 had a similar scene to ours; there as a short clip of the soldier stabbing a person and it showed the process of the knife going in and out of the body like in our horror film.

Therefore we decided to keep the age rating as '15' as we believe that our content is not as violent as for example the content in the horror film 'SAW'. Furthermore, in our narrative, Mila continuously takes anti-depressant pills . If we showed her to be obsessed with these and continuously take them then it may have been an 18 rated film.

Update: Final Script after the introduction of new scene & psychiatrist

Final script from m_xch

Audience feedback for dry-cut edit of our horror film

Update on our thought process: We are going to add a scene where there is psychiatrist (not shown) talking to Mila, asking her questions and then having Mila argue with herself. This is to clarify that there are two identities in one character as our audience at first did not understand that the main character, Mila, had a pseudo identity, and one that was bad and one that was good. To clarify this, and also her reason to kill her bullies, there will be a psychiatrist asking her about how her bullying is going and if she is feeling okay. During this, both the identities will be talking to each other and then the bad one will disappear off to make it seem like she is in her head.

This is similar to my textual analysis on the short psychological horror film 'P.S.' as there is a doctor / psychologist asking the main character personal questions, which allows us as the audience to gain an insight into what's happening in the character's life.

post production / production of poster

open new blank page
upload both final images to photoshop cs6
upload backgeround image of the trees
usemove tool to make it bigger and spread it out on the page

Mariam cropped out the green  screen using the magic wand tool for both images and drag them to the centre.
I then used the magic wand tool and zoomed into the pictures until all I saw was big pixels and removed the remaining green colour which gave the current pictures the fresh 'on its own' look.
Mariam used the 'Move tool' to resize the image and made it slightly bigger.
I copied the layers of the images 2 times and change the opacity and colour overlay by right clicking on the layer, pressing blending options and adjusting what is needed. I chose the colours from the colour scales, so one copied layer was red and one was green for both images. I piled them on top of each other with about half a cm apart from the beginning of the colours. I brought the layers to the back by dragging the layers to the bottom on the right hand panel. the main normal image was in the front. This created my hallucination look.
download fonts 'cabanyalZ' and 'who told satan' from dafont.com.
CabanyalZ used for title and 'coming soon', November 16th'.
'who told satan' font for actors real names, tagline and 'a dark arts production film'
used the move tool all to postiiton them
used the magic wand tool to take out the white bits in my logo design when I placed it on the page. Then I used the 'styles' page on the right to change the colour to a greyish green.
I then uploaded the 15 rated film logo and place on top left using move tool.

Changes from the feedback of the poster:
I used another picture of Bushrah and placed her in the middle of her two identities.
I changed the hue of the background using the blur and saturation tools to make it a dark red / brown background and used the blur tool to blur the trees in order to make the characters stand out.
The tagline font was changed to Time New Roman to make it more understandable and less comical. I also added a gradient effect to the font as grey and white but then was changed by Mariam and Noshin to a deep red and white due to further audience feedback.
I added the drips of blood on the second 'S' of the title using the stamp tool to make it look like there is blood dripping from that one letter 'S'.
I duplicated the layers of both the characters on the left and right twice to change the colour of the hoodies to deep green and red whilst keeping their faces cropped on top.
Mariam finished off the poster with adding a quote on the top of the poster: 'All monsters are human'.
I downloaded the font 'Universal Credits' from Dafont.com and used this for the credits in our movie at the bottom of the poster.
I used the pipet too to match the blood colour to the font and to match it with the same colour as the gradient red on the tagline and red hoodie.

Finally, to make sure that everything would be printed out correctly like the industry would do it, we moved around the imaged after enabling the grid lines and we made sure there were at east 2 bars of spaces between the texts and images.

Equipment and location contracts signed

Actor's contracts signed

Actors contracts signed from m_xch